Monday, 9 May 2016

With the
results of the Assembly election all done and dusted the log-jam in Welsh
politics remains firmly in place. It’s
partly to do with the nature of the electoral system in Wales. On that point, just over a week ago,
Professor Richard Wyn Jones of the Wales Governance Centre, wrote an article
for the Sunday Times about the electoral system in Wales, which also appears on
the Governance Centre’s website. It draws attention to the way in which the
particular electoral system used in Wales favours the Labour Party, and makes
it difficult to remove them from power.

At one level,
that should be no surprise; the electoral system, like many other aspects of
the devolution settlement in Wales, is a product of the Labour Party’s internal
difficulties and disputes. The result is
that it’s a bit proportional, but not too much so.

What are the
alternatives? This little chart is based
on the results of last week’s elections, and shows a range of various possible
scenarios, based on the votes actually cast last week. (Note: all of these depend on the accuracy of
my arithmetic!)

Party

Const's

Region

A

B

C

D

E

Labour

27

2

29

40 or 41

27

21

19

Plaid

6

6

12

9

11

12

13

Tory

6

5

11

9

10

13

11

UKIP

0

7

7

0

6

8

8

Lib Dem

1

0

1

1 or 2

3

5

4

ATA

0

0

0

0

2

0

3

Green

0

0

0

0

1

1

2

Total

40

20

60

60

60

60

60

Column A is the
result actually recorded in the elections, for comparison purposes.

Column B is an
attempt to show what the result might have been if Wales had 60 individual
constituencies, each electing one member under the first past the post system. It simply assumes that the extra 20
constituencies carved out of the ones which exist would fall the same way – in practice,
of course, it would vary depending on how the boundaries were drawn. It does show, though, that Labour could
expect to dominate a wholly FPTP Assembly – which is why some of them have
argued for exactly that in recent years.

Column C shows
what would have happened had we had a single national list to allocate 20 seats
rather than five regional lists. It
improves the situation a little, but still doesn’t really dent Labour’s
dominance because of their success in the constituency seats.

Column D shows
what the result might look like if the constituency votes for all the parties
were summed and the seats allocated on the basis of the total votes; Column E
does the same thing based on the regional list votes. Both of these are what might be called ‘truly
proportional’ results, where the number of seats held by each party directly
reflects the proportion of the votes gained.
And they highlight the extent to which Labour, in particular, is
over-represented based on votes cast. As
for the other parties – well, Plaid, the Tories, and UKIP are actually not far
off a fair share of seats; two are very marginally over-represented. The ‘losers’ from a lack of proportionality
are the Lib Dems, the Greens – and the Abolish the Assembly party. Whilst I wouldn’t particularly welcome the
presence of the last of those in the Assembly, those of us who support fair
voting systems have to accept that that might well include providing a platform
for those with whom we disagree.

So I agree with
the point made by Professor Jones; the current system is ‘sticky’ in that, up
to a certain point, changing voting patterns are not reflected in changing
patterns of representation; short of a seismic change in voting patterns,
Labour’s hegemony will continue. I’m
less optimistic than he seems to be however, when he says “Here’s hoping that this will be the last Welsh devolved election
conducted through the medium of the current electoral system.” I don’t see the system changing any time
soon.

Whilst it’s
true that the question of the voting system to be used is amongst the matters
set to be devolved to the Assembly itself, it’s also the case that this is one
of the matters where Westminster is requiring that there must be a ‘super-majority’
in favour of any change. That means that
there have to be at least 40 AMs who agree not only that the voting system
should change, but also what the new system should be. I don’t see Labour agreeing to making the
system more proportional, and that means that as long as they have 20 or more
AMs, it won’t happen, even if every other AM could be signed up to a single
agreed alternative proposal. (Fortunately,
the system is proportional enough to make it even more unlikely that they’ll
ever have 40 AMs as a party, which at least means that they can’t change the
system to wholly FPTP!)

It’s not only
the results of the voting system which are therefore ‘sticky’; the system
itself falls into the same category. It’s
a question of chickens and eggs; as things stand, we won’t see any change to the
voting system in Wales without removing Labour’s hegemony; and we won’t see any
real dent in Labour’s hegemony without a change to the voting system. And that brings us to the second – and more
important - reason for the log-jam in Welsh politics. But I’ll come back to
that tomorrow.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Nonsense.

Leicester City beat all and sundry and won the premiership.James Dyson took on all the big companies and established himself as market leader in the vacuum business.Ruth Davidson took on the SNP and Labour and achieved miracles.

It really is so 'very Welsh' to keep on complaining about 'the system'. Granted, Labour is favoured at the moment. But my suspicion is the Tories will reap the favour of the system in five years time.

Work with how things are, not how you'd like things to be. A lesson for so many living in Wales.

Thought provoking, as always. I would hope, however, that the impending reduction in the number of Welsh constituencies for Westminster will place the matter firmly back on the agenda in the near future.Robert Tyler

"Ruth Davidson ... achieved miracles." Methinks that you need to study the detail a little more carefully! "Party which consistently gets around 20-25% of the vote wins around a quarter of the seats" doesn't strike me as the headline stuff as which it's been presented.

Anyway, your comment pre-empts part 2 tomorrow, so will not respond in more detail here.